Sexy Jihad

Flexbeta has an excellent essay on the floppy drive and why it’s had its day (duh):

It’s something universally recognized with computers, and something I’ve come to loathe with a passion. Even though it’s changed over the years, it’s still mostly the same. I speak of none other than the floppy disk. We all know about it. That little black disk we’d have to dig out back in grade school every time the teacher gave us an assignment to do on the computer. The floppy disk was well intended, but its usefulness is now gone. Now, over 30 years later, the floppy disk needs to go for good.

It’s hard to think about how far we’ve come with our big storage numbers today, with the original floppy disk being eight inches and only holding 80 kilobytes. The floppy disk has at least decreased in physical size and increased in capacity. That doesn’t account for much though. Floppy disks are 3 ½ inches in size and only hold 1.44 Megs of data. Floppy disks might not even be so bad if they could just hold more. But with the size of different programs and files today, 1.44 Megs just doesn’t cut it. A single song on average is about 3 Megs. I know people have, numerous times, tried to do an assignment of some sort or had some important file they had to move, only to try and upload it to the floppy and it’s just too big. This is frustrating for sure.

I will be sad to see them go, but the time has snow trully come. With over 30 years, they’ve had a far better run than most computer equipment. Floppies are the last remnants of an age were computing was innocent and for that killing the floppy is truly killing an era.

I have very fond memories of booting games at amazing speeds from a floppy disk, in the days when tape drives could take an hour to load a game. Also copying my first PC games and ARJing them onto multiple disks (wiping tear from eye). Those were glorious days……

I for one will surly miss the floppy when it’s killed, as in the past it personified a big piece of my life. So many of my own programs and work have I saved on floppies. But alas, its time surley has come. To the floppy I can only say this:

I bid you good day, good sir……

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